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I'm working on a redesign of the main Jekyll project site, so I thought I'd kick of a pull-request for this nice and early to start collecting feedback.

Here's a screenshot of the initial direction:

@mojombo I know you already mentioned that you weren't completely sold on the cursive font for the header, but I haven't got around to playing with other options for it just yet.

The current description of Jekyll that seems to be used in most places is that it is a "simple, blog-aware, static site generator" so I thought it would make sense to elaborate on those three aspects as their own brief headings/paragraphs on the homepage—thus the headings in the screenshot: Simple, Blog-aware, and Static. The copy for these paragraphs aren't visually even in length yet, but my goal is to have them be three equally short, punchy, and clear descriptions of what it is exactly that Jekyll is.

Further down the page, I'd like to include a section explaining the whole "Free hosting using GitHub Pages" concept, how people can use Jekyll for their new site and mention that it's the engine behind Pages and so forth.

Then, toward the bottom of the page, I imagine having a prominent invitation for people to take—such as continuing on to the docs, or going to a separate page of the site with clear instructions for installation/setup and maybe even a blankslate folder structure to get them started (with template/layout files and so forth). I'm aware that one of the design goals of Jekyll is that the file structure is reasonably loose—however it might be worth considering having a starter structure for people to get up and running quickly. I'd love to get some input into whether this is a silly idea or not.

There's obviously a lot more work to go into this, as I'm still at the stage of working out what information the landing page needs to have and the best way to explain it all—so all suggestions and feedback welcome!

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Just pushed some more updates—I'm thinking a terminal prompt window might be a good way to do the install instructions. The screenshot below is using colors from the Desert Vim colorscheme, but can anyone suggest a colorscheme that might work better with the rest of the site's colors?

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Alrighty then—this should be pretty much ready to go now. It’s getting to the stage where I think it’d be better to have this merged in and do any subsequent changes as separate pulls. @mojombo, @qrush, can I get you guys to pull the new site down and have a poke around to make sure there’s nothing major that needs fixed first?

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I do think however that there may be a problem with layout on iOS devices. The entire site shows up as flush left in Mobile Safari. As a result, the logo appears to be clipped. Is anyone else seeing this? Want to be sure it's not just me...

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I haven’t put any time/effort into making this responsive at all yet. It wouldn’t take much work, but I’d rather do those changes as subsequent pull requests rather than just dragging this one out any longer than it is.

Also, I’ve always been slightly wary of relying on responsive site checkers in desktop browsers, as they won’t give you a true representation of how mobile devices zoom viewports and so forth.

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Honestly, I don't think many people will be reading Jekyll documentation on the mobile device as you cannot even run Jekyll on a mobile device. So I don't think it's that big of a priority as people think. Just my 2 cents.

This is the big site redesign by @cobyism. To work with the new
site deployment mechanism, it is being copied from the gh-pages
branch of that PR into the existing site dir. Before we finally
deploy the new site, we should remember to merge #583 so that we
keep all the history from that PR.

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This redesigned site has now been copied into the site dir on the master branch in commit cc73f04. Further site changes should be issued as pull requests against the master branch. I'm closing this PR (to get it out of the way), but it will be merged into the gh-pages branch before final redesigned site deployment.

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Well it's not really as much about liking as it is about functionality of a logo. Unlike art, design serves a function or a purpose and not much about likes or dislikes.

The new logo is more of an illustration rather than a logo. A logo needs to represent a whole lot than it is (in this case, our beloved jekyll). That's why there is a certain way softwares logos (or any logos for that matter) are done. This one doesn't qualify a logo.

One can use a photo and call it a logo but a photo is worse example of a logo - illustration is bad as well.

I wonder what core team has to say about that.

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We had neither a logo or illustration before this issue. I whipped up the
old website because I was excited to contribute something back. The "logo"
before was some poorly center aligned text that took me hours to get right
working in most browsers.

This is such a noncontributing, bikeshed argument and has no reason to
continue. Please take this negativity and attitude elsewhere, the people
that have worked hard on Jekyll for years (and months!) don't deserve it.

They do deserve a site that looks great, and that's exactly what was
contributed here. Enact change by doing, not complaining.

On Tuesday, May 14, 2013, King Sidharth wrote:

Well it's not really as much about liking as it is about functionality of
a logo. Unlike art, design serves a function or a purpose and not much
about likes or dislikes.

The new logo is more of an illustration rather than a logo. A logo needs
to represent a whole lot than it is (in this case, our beloved jekyll).
That's why there is a certain way softwares logos (or any logos for that
matter) are done. This one doesn't qualify a logo.

One can use a photo and call it a logo but a photo is worse example of a
logo - illustration is bad as well.

I wonder what core team has to say about that.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/583#issuecomment-17872404
.

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@kingsidharth❤️ I totally get where you’re coming from, and I don’t take your criticisms personally at all, so don’t worry about that 😀. I don’t think anyone here would ever say this is the world’s best logo, and I’m sure everyone would be more than open to changing the logo if someone has the time to create a better one. I played around with the logo a bit as I worked on this, but my main focus was really the content, layout, and information architecture of the site—I’m definitely not 100% happy with the logo, but that should never be a reason to hold up something from shipping. The key to a good design process in my experience is iteration, and that’s what happened here. If you (or anyone else) ever wants to take what’s currently there and iterate further, that’d be ✨

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